Miami County, Ohio Election Official Resigns Under Weird Circumstances

Steve Quillen, Miami County elections director, on Friday morning submitted his resignation “due to the stress of the upcoming presidential election.”

The Miami County Board of Elections held an executive session Thursday afternoon, and the board accepted Quillen’s resignation via a 4-0 vote at an emergency meeting Friday morning.

I'm thinking about how these things happen. If stress, usually what happens is the resignation is simply submitted to the board and the board accepts it, because stress is usually related to something internal, not external. It creates health issues and the like. Yet they held an emergency board meeting on Friday morning and as a result of that board meeting, accepted Quillen's resignation.

Here's something else that happened at that emergency board meeting:

Also during the meeting, the board voted to terminate a temporary election employee, but Luring would not say if these two actions by board were related.

There appears to have been a significant delay in getting absentee ballots out in this county, too. Due to be mailed out on October 2nd, it seems that it took longer than it should. And then there's the weirdness surrounding orders from Secretary of State Jon Husted, ordering local officials not to contact voters by phone about issues with their absentee ballots. Instead, they must contact them by mail, which means a far longer delay in processing those ballots. Here's one story from Butler County, Ohio, via Democratic Underground:

My father had a stroke a few years ago, and he has trouble reading. He votes absentee, so my mother can help him with the ballot. Well, he sent in his ballot a couple weeks ago, and he did EVERYTHING as instructed. Everything was signed, documented, etc. Proper postage and everything.

Yesterday, he got a letter from the Butler County board of elections saying something was not up to snuff with his ballot, and he had to provide one of the following blah blah blah. One of the choices is his drivers license number, which he already included on the absentee ballot. It says he has to deliver it by hand to their office and his deadline is November 16th.

I can think of a couple of possibilities. One, that this Republican elections director had some shreds of integrity in him and defended an election worker who reached out directly to voters in his mostly rural district if there was an issue with their ballot. Or two, that he saw issues with the new voting machines in this county which were possibly raised by that election worker fired, and found himself being forced to resign after the worker was fired. Or, perhaps it was just a tawdry affair between a worker and her boss. Or his boss. Who knows?

Ohio just raises the hackles on the back of my neck in every general election, and this one is no exception. This story has more to it than just stress and a random firing of an election worker. I smell it, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe one of the crack investigative reporters out there like Lee Fang will be able to get a fix on what's going on.